Enjoy wine, advises Horace – but don’t overstep the boundaries!
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post here.
Xanthias the Phocian is in love with a slave. What does Horace think? What he says is reassuring and supportive on the surface, but, as TE Page the Victorian commentator pithily remarks, the intention is clearly satirical throughout. As part of his (apparently) supportive reasoning, Horace quotes examples from among Greek heroes who fought the Trojan War – one of them Achilles, who was captivated by the captive Briseis but had her confiscated by Agamemnon to replace a priest’s daughter whom he had to return to her father to appease Apollo, as related at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad. This was the cause of Achilles’s withdrawal from the fighting and the starting-point of the events that ensue in Homer’s great epic.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration form a Roman fresco shows the parting of Achilles and Briseis. (Photo ArchaiOptix, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Roman boxers fought with gloves designed to inflict the maximum damage on one another: the cestus, heavy leather strapping studded with lead around knuckles and forearms. In the games that Aeneas holds in Book 5 of the Aeneid in memory of his father, Anchises, Entellus, a great athlete but now old and slow, takes on Dares, the fast and nimble young champion.
The illustration shows the aftermath of the bout in a Roman mosaic. Learn the significance of the bull, and hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English, here.
Erysichthon, the blasphemer, begins Ovid’s horror-story about crime and punishment in his metamorphoses. The oak-tree in the picture, the Fredville Oak, has a roughly similar circumference to Ceres’s sacred tree, which Erysichthon is about to profane.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Erysichthon’s terrible hunger, the punishment inflicted on him by the Goddess Ceres, drives him to sell his own daughter: she finds a way to escape her new master, but there is no way for Erysichthon to escape a terrible death.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English translation here.
Hear Ovid’s version of the abduction of the beautiful Europa by Jupiter disguised as a bull here.